Poetry is a precise art. A great poem is made up of components that fit together so well that the result seems impossible to imagine any other way. But how to describe those meticulously chosen components? With highly specialized terminology, of course. Thanks to centuries of effort by scholars, you too can identify the most-nuanced part of a poem with a single word (or two)!
Epizeuxis (\epə'züksəs\)
Hark, hark! Words, words, words. Never, never, never, never, never! Epizeuxis is a term that describes the repetition of a word for emphasis. (William Shakespeare was a particular master.)
Epithalamium (\epəthə'lāmēəm\)
Getting married and want to celebrate with a poem? You need an epithalamium. The genre dates back to at least the 7th century BCE, and its purpose is to wish a newly married couple well. Edmund Spenser published one of the classic examples in English for his own wedding in 1595, and it offers an evocative image of his bride: “Her cheekes lyke apples which the sun hath rudded, / Her lips lyke cherryes charming men to byte.”
Eye rhyme
Two words that look similar but sound different make an eye rhyme. Examples: laughter and daughter, come and home, ocean and man. Definitely not eye and by, or rhyme and dime.
Headless line
The unit of measure in a line of verse is a foot, and many poems use the same number and type of feet in each line. When a line is one syllable short of the usual pattern and that syllable is missing from the beginning of the first foot of the line, the result is a headless line. The poet Geoffrey Chaucer showed some fondness for it. The “General Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales, which generally lopes along at 10 syllables per line, opens with “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote”—a nine-syllable line with its head lopped off.
Rove-over
We have Gerard Manley Hopkins to thank for the rove-over. He developed the idea of “sprung poetry,” which consists of metrical feet counted by only their stressed syllables. (It’s more common to count feet by using both stressed and unstressed syllables.) A rove-over happens when a foot begins at the end of one line and ends on the following line. Which may sound a bit boring until you read Hopkins’s own description of it from 1918.
Hyperbaton (\hī'pərbətän\)
The word hyperbaton comes from the Greek for “transposed,” and that’s what it means when applied to word order in poetry: it’s inverted, unusual, sometimes disorienting. “Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,” says Ophelia in Hamlet, a twisting and suspenseful line.
Macaronic (\makə'ränik\)
Macaronic is a type of poetry that intermingles languages. Hilarity ensues. Early practitioners of the macaronic, in the 14th century, stuck Latin endings onto words of their vernacular language, in the spirit of the butter, flour, and cheese mash-up that was medieval macaroni. The poetic version proved so amusing that the form proliferated far beyond its Latin roots, such that macaronic is used today to describe any verse that mixes and matches languages.
Polyptoton (\päləp'tōtän\)
Repetition is more than just epizeuxis. Polyptoton describes the repetition of the same word—and also of words related etymologically—in different senses or cases or voices. T.S. Eliot used polyptoton in “The Dry Salvages”: “No end to the withering of withered flowers” and “Only the hardly, barely prayable / Prayer of the one Annunciation.” John Lennon and Paul McCartney gave it a try too: “Please Please Me.”
Anacrusis (\anə'krüsəs\)
It’s easiest simply to quote Britannica’s definition: anacrusis is “the up (or weak) beat, one or more syllables at the beginning of a line of poetry that are not regarded as a part of the metrical pattern of that line. Some scholars do not acknowledge this phenomenon.” A term that describes something that may not exist? That’s the most useful kind of literary term.